You're the only ten I see.

And we’re back! After a 3-summer-blog hiatus, Paige and Matt’s excellent adventure has resumed! The band is back together for Matt’s 7^th puppet touring summer. Seven! You know what that means? That means seven summers of people asking him what his real job is!

The tour bus has expanded a bit this year. In addition to our dog, Emma, who came along for the third summer tour, we now have our human child, Apolline. Additionally, this tour coincides with the world’s slowest cross country move, so the tour bus also features many boxes of our belongings, which we are taking to our new home in Texas. And when I say tour bus, I mean both of our old-ass beat up corollas. Basically, we’re like one big sad caravan, rolling around the nation, with our little cute things doing very little to contribute to their survival, and our tired selves carrying all of their crap.

The tour kicked off with a trip to Knoxville. Matt did some shows in East Tennessee and we had a chance to hit up some putt-putt, which obviously offered multiple opportunities for the baby to be cute.

Then we swung back through Nashville for one short night to goodbye for good to the place that has been home for so long. We took one last walk around the block, and got a surprisingly heartfelt goodbye from the mailman. Even the cat that has ignored us for five years came by for a farewell pet. Before we rolled away, we took a family picture in front of the house we were leaving, because memories. Goodbye little house – you were the place where we got married, started our family, and hosted so many wonderful Sunday dinners. You had creaky floors, a broken stove, and a lumpy front yard, but you were home to us.

I admit I was pretty sad as we caravanned away from Nashville, but it was time to seize the summer, so I fixed my face and drove to Memphis. We spent a relaxing night by the pool and headed on to Walmartland (Bentonville, Arkansas) for a few days of shows.

This is the seventh puppet tour, and the seventh year that Matt’s been booked in Northwest Arkansas, so we visited all our favorite old haunts, and all our favorite Arkansans – my dad and his wife, and Fayetteville friends Margot and Jordan, who happen to own a lot of stuffed pandas. The baby was quite enamored with the pandas, though she kept calling them bananas. What do you do? English is hard.

We move on westward!